Versatile climbing robot for vessels inspection

Abstract

This work focuses on proposing and designing a new climbing robot to explore the interiors of industrial vessels and enables a human outside the vessels to implement required regular inspection tasks efficiently. There are two main adhesion systems in the literature: magnetic and air suction systems. The magnetic system climbs surfaces made of ferromagnetic materials only, while air suction system cannot handle irregular surfaces due to possible seals damage. Opposite to previous climbing robots, the proposed robot here can climb and navigate vessels made from different materials besides handling possible irregular surfaces during inspection. Its main task is visual inspection of welds and any critical spots inside these vessels. The novelty of this robot comes from utilizing a hybrid actuation system. This hybrid actuation system consists of upturned propellers fixed on mobile robot and motorized wheels of the mobile robot. The pressure generated from the upturned propellers increase the friction force between the wheels of the mobile robot and the wall. The wheels' motors generate the required torque either to fix the robot in any position or to move it to any place. Since the motion of the robot comes mainly from the motorized wheel, the stability of the system during navigation is guaranteed. Size and topology optimizations are carried out to achieve optimum design of the proposed robot. Simulation results of the designed robot using ADAMS software prove its feasibility.